In the ineffable essence of all experience as pure presence, everything is light. – Longchen Rabjampa, Drimé Öze 

In my three decades of doing deep therapeutic-trance work with thousands of people, two things have become clear: 

1. Each human being is an utter mystery … and                                            
2. Each individual possesses vast powers that go largely unrecognized. 

Most people, it seems, simply have no idea of their intrinsic magnificence nor of the full extent of their creative potentials. Many live their lives on the hard surfaces of ‘concrete-reality’ and often complain about boredom – or as Thoreau put it, they, “… lead lives of quiet desperation.” 

What is the mostly unrecognized, untapped essence of the human being? For starters, and directly stated; each human being is an inscrutable intersection of infinities. You, me – everybody!  Consider this: 

Contexts of Reality

Like tiny bugs blown out to sea on great storms, engulfed by the immensity of sky above and black depths below, we, with our self-reflective consciousness, are able to consider our presence within three vast arenas: 

1. Temporal; past times, and future times yet to be –
2. Spatial; of ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ spaces –
3. Numerical; of the inconceivable numbers and relative sizes of things: atoms, microbes, cells, people, seas, mountains, planets, stars, and galaxies.

Recognized or not, these realities contextualize and intersect within each of us. Such disturbing vastness, when deeply contemplated, can for some bring on a sense of nausea, and thus the scientist Teilhard de Chardin metaphorically referred to each of these immensities as a kind of ‘malady.’

Numbed and entranced by all the dizzying demands of modern living, few people ever scratch the surface of their basic high school science. We mostly miss the staggering circumstances in which we are embedded. Philosopher Abraham Heschel counsels us,

Under the running sea of our theories and scientific explanations lies the aboriginal abyss of radical amazement.

Contemplating the vastness of the temporal, spatial and numerical realities. Image: Sasha Freemind

Cosmic Grandeur

I remember being at the Byron Bay lighthouse on the east coast of Australia a few years ago at sunrise and getting smashed by the naked fact that the sun is actually a star, just like all the brilliant white pinpoints of light seen at night; though instead of a distance of light-years, our home-star sits a mere hundred and fifty million kilometers away. Standing there looking out over the ocean, I was immobilized by the reality of my solar relationship and couldn’t move for some fifteen minutes – double the time needed for our home star’s light to reach my eyes … light from a somewhat ordinary star amongst hundreds of billions in our home-galaxy – The Milky Way. 

Now astronomers have concluded that there are one to two trillion galaxies in the known universe, meaning that in the cosmos there are more gigantic thermonuclear balls of gas (stars) than there are grains of sand on all the beaches on Earth!

Objective and Subjective Intersections

Yogis and mystics throughout the ages have told us that what we consider the ‘inner-universe’ is just as immense as the outer. Each human being is situated between these truly ineffable immensities, wherein words are incapable of adding meaning to the sheer fact of it all. 

Time

Again … we exist between a deep past and a deep future – measured in billions of years … tottering precariously, briefly, just on the edge of now. Our modest life-spans seem to blur into what some have called … ‘time out of mind.’

Scales of Reality

And then there are also the scales of reality – the relative sizes of things. Humans seem to be medium-sized – in the middle – between galactic clusters and quantum particles. Thus, in these three ways (temporal, spatial, numerical) … we are truly, each one of us, an intersection of infinities. Miraculous! 

We traverse our days and nights, having our unique (and often undervalued) experiences as glowing self-aware mysteries, moving – hopefully evolving (perhaps inevitably) – toward greater Self-Awareness. Life is amazing!

Unrecognized Potential

So, being actually poised between all these immensities, what then are our creative capacities? Maybe consider this example:

To a tribal hunter-gatherer who has never seen a car, it would be intriguing to simply look at a car – to walk up to it, tap the roof, prod the tires with his spear, and if he were bold and a door were open, maybe get in – perhaps sit in the driver’s seat, or even turn the steering wheel. But from only this much experience does this individual know what a car really is? And how might his understanding intensify were a driver to get in, start it up, and drive that car away? 

From only this much experience does this individual know what a car really is? Image: Gabe Hyde

Enter the Placebo Effect

“Oh, that’s only the placebo effect.”  

This kind of modulation of the physical body seems to border on the supernatural. Image: Pawel Szymanski

Only! It’s a case of mind over matter if there ever was! Something of the inner-mind has brought about a real and often dramatic change on the physical plane – and to the physical body. The medical literature is filled with case histories of what seem like miracle cures. 

One of the most well-known and medically documented placebo-response cases was of a ‘Mr. Wright’ that occurred in Long Beach, California in 1957 when tumors the size of oranges melted overnight when his physician, Dr. Philip West, injected him with the serum, Krebiozen, that was later proven to be completely ineffective against cancer. 

The essence of this research is that human beings are generating the measurable changes; not some inert substance! We have powers and potentials that slumber within, and yet, all too often fear and doubt induce a repression of that magnificence. Let’s skip to the big stuff. 

Critical Mass!

One of the supreme attainments of all our human potentials occurs when we ‘re-cognize’ our way into an ‘awareness of awareness.’ This explosive, iterative, sweet-spot of ‘Self being consciously aware of (It)Self’ – Self-realization – happens outside of time. 

The ‘little-self’ gently evaporates. 

Linear time evaporates. 

Verbs evaporate.

 … and then:

‘… the always-already-present Unified-Reality beyond all the conceptions of the thinking-mind …’

‘… bliss, compassion, wisdom, love, infinity …’ 

‘… just … THIS !’

Spiritual teacher Marianne Williamson, by her prescient nudging, shines a light onto this dilemma of the small self, its fear, and its associated potentials when she says,  

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.

And sometimes the linguistic residue of this realized wisdom consists of moving poetic pointers: Again, from Heschel,

Each thing is a surprise, being is unbelievable. We are amazed at seeing anything at all.

~

Beloved UPLIFT family … How are you travelling? These are strange times. And yet times are always strange. Perspective and folding into the mystery can really help. We would love to hear some of your insights and realisations in the comments below. Thank you for journeying with us each week.

Much love as always

Team UPLIFT